Off-Topic Thread V3.0

It does appear they're making more of an effort to separate HEDT and workstation, unlike Intel.

But my current machine might be on its last legs, and I may not be able to wait that long.

The new Intel HEDT rollout appear to be a bit disjointed. There's motherboards and barebones servers available in the usual places, but no sign of any of the actual CPUs. So if you feel inclined you can easily drop thousands on a W9 ready server just to have it sit there as a paper weight for now.

Following on from my previous complaints about HEDT options, I went and built a Xeon W9 based system, with a 36 core 3475X. Although I did consider a build log thread for it, it seemed a bit too much like thanks whoring/work so I didn't bother.

For the most part it's been fairly painless. The first 5 minutes though were filled with panic though. Upon first power on, it gave no video output, and a flashing warning LED came on. The manual listed it as the catastrophic CPU LED. Turned out all it was doing was defaulting to HDMI, and not the plugged in display port, and the flashing LED was the one to show the on-board BMC was working, which some genius though was a good idea to place the LED for just 2mm away from the catastrophic failure one.

I did compromise on the NVME drive though. Despite PCIe 5 ones being officially released, no where has stock of them, so I went with a PCIe 4 Samsung 980 instead. I can revisit that when full speed PCIe 5 ones finally appear.

Software wise, there's a few hiccups. There's no software that can properly manage the fan speeds. That's the price to be paid for a nice and new platform. Some of the science apps I'm running for PrimeGrid seem a bit weirded out by the core count though. Some of them can load up the CPU properly, but others claim to start 64 threads, yet only load up 8 threads with work. I tried looking for a way to disable hyperthreading to see if that improved things, but Intel don't seem to support this option lately, arguing that OS scheduling should be good enough now to not need this.

3dMark gives an appalling score, as it doesn't reconigse the hardware. I did get a Steam achievement for that though, as some meagre compensation.

If anyone saw my past thread on the mysterious lockups I was having with my X299 based machine, the same GPU and PSU are in use in this machine, and show no issues at all, which seems to further support the old board was dying.